The video industry has adopted the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) 259M (level C) standard almost exclusively for high quality video in studio and production applications. In some applications, a SMPTE 259M signal is to be transported to a remote location, which may be several miles away for example. Current methods of transporting SMPTE 259M signals or other professional quality video signals to remote locations use optical carriers, such as OC-12 channels or point-to-point fiber connectivity.
Bit errors may occur in an optical network which carries real-time SMPTE 259M video data. Determining video-frame-level consequences of incurring bit errors is difficult in the absence of protocol handshake and retransmission in transporting the real-time video data. Since interfaces (codecs) at the edge of the video network automatically change an original SMPTE 259M bit stream by generating a line code which differs from the original signal,